Some people care because we don't want centralization of mining resources. That's why I mined on eligius, and why I prefer to mine to p2pool. It's actually a quite fair little system with no possibility for an errant pool owner to run off with all the payouts. There is a 1% donation to the guy who built it, but that's it and you can disable that if you want as a node..

Saw that. Oddly enough the Titan motherboard with some small fixes would be a pretty good place to build a 800mh per cube sort of device. But that's probably not going to happen.

It would be nice to see a vendor challenge Bitmain for the scrypt market, and although KNC could have done some improvements to their Titans (oh like not fucking running the hotel circuits for all 4 dies on one common bus, two PCIe plugs at least, optoisolators on the signal lines, not using total crap heat paste, a 50 cent DC-DC converter on the Titan instead of sourcing power from the control board, etc) the basic design with OEM power supplies surrounding a chip die was not a bad one. And the cheap-o case is pretty iconic.

Still, the ones they did build have lasted for a couple of years now (in an era where miner operation is measured in weeks it seems) and as long as you don't do the obvious bad things (run them over 45c per chip, keep them around 65mh per cube tops, keep the power supply temps in the 60-70's, don't unplug them while running, don't run them in a fucking horse crap filled barn*, etc) they seem to tick along pretty well.

C
(Why yes I did have to repair one that was chock full of horse crap and hay. That one got the hose....)

Oh post a pic or a link to a imgur or something.

Ok. I'll PM you my info, I'll take a look at the little thing.

Hm. If they are first generation Monarchs (2 power plugs per board) then you need to run the special 4.20 version of BFGMiner on 64 bit Windows. Annoying, but it works. Or you can run BFGMiner on Unix, that also seems to work. Later models (3 PCI power plugs) can run the latest BFGMiner without issue.

I never really put them in a PC; the water blocks and such required too much fiddling around to make them fit.

Hope this helps. They were good units, just a bit too slow for modern times.

Haven't been in this thread for awhile, but yes I can probably help. What seems to be wrong with it?

Ok, got all four of these cubes working. All were totally blown, all now fixed. The last one I got three full dies out of four, turns out power supplies 2,3 were both shorted, had to remove them both. I'm a bit better at replacing power supplies these days, but my belief is if you actually get to the point where you have 3 dies running at full power, quit while you are ahead :-)

200 watts per cube is a fully running cube. :-) Now to pack these up and work on the next batch. I'm still taking repairs, getting better every day...

C

Don't know. People have posted links in the thread in the past, read a few back and if you find it let me know; I'll put it in post 2.

Or just run them a bit slower. Overheating the supplies can cause a supply to fail shorted to the SCL bus, bit pain to find but I'm working on it.

C

Meantime busy here. This one cube which was totally dead has been interesting: Biggest problem was a short on pin 8, I found that die 2 was shorting the lines to the power supplies, so I pulled the jumpers. That allowed the board to be seen with power off, but not on. Which led me to think it was a problem with a power supply.

So I pulled the two supplies that ran die 2. Still no go. Then tried pulling the supply 1 (on die 0, the one closest to the front). That got the board to respond on the SPI lines, which means it is a short in a supply that can kill the board. Pulled the supply, fired it up, now hashing at 30mh with one fully working die at 325, one at 150 (running on the remaining supply) with a third die down for unknown reasons.

What a pain. Will see if this works for the other board.

It dipped to 1813 this morning? God that will shatter my hopes and dreams. How terrible!

:-)

Crap. Well, removed all the signal chips (z17 and TPS ones) and the thing does the same thing. Which  means that one of the supplies is dead shorted from +12 to the SCL bus, probably the telemetry chip. And since they're all on the same line no way to identify which one.

That sucks. Will think about it more tomorrow.

Meantime I am working on these other two dead boards: They're odd. They don't have the usual shorts on pins 4 and 6, but they have something different.

In these cases, they have 1k resistance on pin 4, open circuit on 6. That is odd. More odd is that when I plug this board into a controller with no 12v it does not show up (but doesn't shut down the controller). Power up 12v and the controller shuts down. So there is something amis on the 12v line on the telemetry circuits. Which makes no sense as 12v never goes to telemetry, that's all powered by the controller. Odd.

The second board had 30 ohms to ground on pin 8, a show stopper and nothing on pin 6, same oddity. Checked the board, shut down the controller even with no 12v. First thing was to figure out pin 8, looking at the 4 gateway 0ohm shunts around the chip I noticed that one of them (pin 8 is a signal line from the titan chip controllers, sda line) had a resistance of only 6.8 ohms to ground. THAT means that chip has a short between it's SCL line and the hashing engines. Fortunately you can isolate that die so I did. Result is a board that now doesn't crowbar the controller with no +12 and does with.

Odd, similar errors. No idea quite why. Will continue to research and see why applying 12v will shut down the controller. Maybe there is a common element somewhere....

C

They are quite similar, except of course that Neppies do SHA and Titans do scrypt. But a lot of the support tech is similar, I use Neptunes for parts and ways to trace out circuit paths.

Wake up, look at wisdom, go wow. 1850ish.

Wow.

C

Another two titans, exceptionally badly burned power plugs. Fortunately I was able to get them off and new ones on. Back to full hashing and back to the sender.

A note: These both had the original thermal paste, and I got a chance to see it in action: It's like a rock, which is why as long as the cube isn't disturbed it can provide thermal connection to the dies. But if that heat sink moves the thermal paste shatters like ceramic, and you have little heat transfer. Likewise the lids put some down pressure on the heat sink, so always run them with the lids on.

Also: One of the heat sinks had copper pipes at the bottom that were not coplanar. In order words one of the tubes was lower than the other three, that would cause wicked overheating. Threw it out and used one of my neptune spares, but remember to check that; the bottom of the heat sink has to be perfectly flat.

Back to work on some controllers.

More stuff came in. Two badly burned and dead Titan boards, managed to get one running with 3 dies at full speed, the other had 2 dies recoverable. Blackened on the back, keep an eye on the heat levels on these things.

And another 4 cubes. All were dead, not responding, got two running at full power (65mh@42C, could go higher but that's good) and the other two are still dead. Trying to figure out what's up with those, but two fixed isn't bad for starters.

Never dull.

C

I thought you sold all your LTC when you got it? :-)

It is, however insane. Fun insane.

I highly recommend the book "Trust me, I'm lying" written by Ryan Holiday who was the marketing guy at Amer Apparel. When it comes to social manipulation he is unto a God.

Likewise, The Big Con from the 30's, an excellent work on how con games go. I wonder how many people have opened up their big bitcoin store....

Ah, we call them tools. That's ok, in every revolution you need people who think they are in the smoke filled rooms making policy when in reality they are slaves tilling the soil...